Social media is no longer social

We have been calling it the wrong thing for years. The platforms we use are no longer social media. They are algorithmic media

Somewhere along the way, our feeds stopped connecting us to people and started feeding us content.

Open Instagram or TikTok right now. Scroll for a minute. What is actually in front of you? You scroll past a clip of someone you have never heard of, a car crash, an AI-generated image that looks completely unrealistic, a man you have never met sharing lessons his toddler taught him, a controversy you did not know existed an hour ago, a crypto scam dressed up as financial advice.

A decade ago, opening Facebook meant seeing what your friends were doing. Instagram showed photos from people you chose to follow. Twitter showed posts from accounts you deliberately subscribed to.

Today, a huge percentage of what we see comes from people we never chose, never followed, and will never meet. The shift happened gradually enough that we barely noticed (on purpose).

Social media has descended into just another version of TV. Less about the bright promise of socializing and meeting new friends, more of a mindless media consumption too

Social media became algorithmic media

We have been calling it the wrong thing for years. The platforms we use are no longer social media. They are algorithmic media.

The term “social media” no longer describes the product. Most platforms are not optimized for relationships anymore. They are optimized for engagement. Those are very different goals. A platform optimized for relationships asks: who do you care about? A platform optimized for engagement asks: what will keep you here? And nowadays the second one is winning.

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TikTok was built around it, Instagram copied it, Facebook followed and now LinkedIn is doing the same.

Algorithms now decide what deserves your attention. And increasingly, what deserves your attention is not what matters. It is what performs.

Meta admitted this in a 2025 court filing. The company disclosed that only 7% of time on Instagram and 17% on Facebook is spent viewing content from accounts the user follows. Meta argued in court that it could no longer be a social media monopoly because it is no longer a social media company, apparently since 2025 Meta is a diversified global provider of entertaining and informative content.

Everyone now lives inside a different internet

This might be the most important social consequence.

Twenty years ago, people watched the same TV channels, then they laughed and shared moments commenting what they were watching. Today, everyone’s feed is a completely different reality. Neither of us has any idea what the other person sees every day.

The result is subtle but profound.

We no longer inhabit a common information environment. We inhabit millions of personalized realities. Each one is continuously optimized to reinforce what keeps that specific individual ENGAGED.

You can be in the same room and on the same platform and be on completely different planets. We lost a kind of social glue most people have not noticed, because the loss was designed to be invisible and encouraged individualism.

This is what democratic erosion and fragmented mental health looks like at scale.

Then AI arrived

Just as social media stopped being social, AI arrived and accelerated the trend.

Feeds are increasingly filled with AI-generated images, AI-generated videos, AI-generated comments, AI-generated accounts, AI-generated newsletters, AI-generated expertise, etc.

By recent estimates, around 71% of images shared on social media are now AI-generated. More than half of long-form LinkedIn posts show signs of being written by AI. Some TikTok users report that three quarters of their Reels feed is synthetic. The phenomenon has its own name now: AI slop.

The internet is becoming crowded with content produced because the algorithm needs content, not because humans had something meaningful to say.

And then there are the bots.

Research increasingly suggests that automated activity makes up a significant share of online traffic. Some reports estimate bots now generate more than half of global web traffic. AI personas have hundreds of thousands of followers and do not exist as people.

Just think for a minute about how strange this all is.

We joined social networks to connect with humans. Now a growing share of the environment consists of algorithms interacting with algorithms, generating content for algorithms, while humans sit in the middle consuming the output and getting crazy.

What I’ve been doing and it gave me a peace of mind I didn’t expect

1. Choose depth over volume. One long article you actually read is worth a hundred posts or reels you scrolled past. Spend time with the content you would hace something to say about tomorrow.
2. Find where the real human connection lives. It has probably already moved, to private messages, voice notes, group chats, specific friends, to real life events. Audit where it lives now and protect those spaces at all cost.
3. For some people, like it was for me, the most honest answer is just to quit. One of the most underrated ideas in ‘Deep Work’ is what Cal Newport calls the any-benefit approach. This completely changed how I approach any platform or tool I allow in my life. His reasoning is simple. Anyone whose work depends on sustained thinking should seriously consider walking away from these platforms entirely. Social media is engineered to fragment attention. Sustained attention is the raw material of every meaningful thing you will ever produce, think, or experience. You cannot trade the second for an endless stream of the first and come out ahead. The small benefits social media offers do not justify what you give up to get them. For people doing creative or intellectual work, Newport argues, quitting is just the most rational choice on the table.

Your attention is the foundation of everything you do. Your relationships, your work, your sense of yourself, the thoughts you are even capable of having. What you choose to give it to becomes, over time, who you are.

Most people are letting an algorithm make that choice for them.

Your mind is the only place you live. Choose what fills it very very carefully.

𝘈𝘯𝘥𝘳𝘢 — 𝘍𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘴 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘍𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 & 𝘏𝘪𝘨𝘩-𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘴

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Sources

• Petter Törnberg and Richard Rogers, Towards a Post-Social Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, 2026. [ResearchGate link]
• John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times. Chart: “Social media has become less social,” data from Global Web Index.

• Cal Newport, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.